It was while Jenny Bird was volunteering with a charity in a Nepalese village that everything fell into place. "I realised that all of the work I was putting into raising awareness about health and the environment would be reversed by climate change," she says. So she moved back to the UK to find a way to make a difference.

Since 2005, Bird has been working as a climate change researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a policy think-tank based in London. "Right from the start I had freedom to pursue my own research and ideas for policies that will improve lives and contribute to the climate change debate," she says. "It's very liberating."

After just two years with the IPPR, she co-authored a report that had a lasting effect on the UK's climate change policies. "Radical groups were calling for the government to increase its promised cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from 60 per cent to 80 per cent by 2050, but no one really knew whether it was possible," Bird says.

"The government needed to know whether an 80 per cent reduction in UK emissions was feasible. They wanted to know how we would generate electricity, how industry would manage, and whether we would need nuclear power."

Her report concluded that the cuts were indeed possible, and contributed to the government's decision in 2008 to raise its promised level of cuts to 80 per cent. "I see my role as making radical ideas a bit more mainstream. That and anticipating problems in climate change that are on the horizon and working up solutions."

A penchant for research, particularly for using statistics, is essential, Bird says. "It's important to be able to interrogate your own ideas if you want to pursue policy research."

Bird believes that one of the most important up-and-coming areas of climate change policy research is justice. "When I was living in Nepal, many of the villagers I was educating about climate change weren't contributing to emissions at all - they travel by bicycle, burn wood for heat and barely use any electricity," she says. "And yet I knew they were the ones who were most at risk from the effects of climate change, through crop failure and flooding. It just seemed so unfair."

"Within five to 10 years, climate change policies are going to need to be a lot tougher on greenhouse gas emitters," says Bird. "It's going to be a big challenge to figure out how to do that fairly, without penalising the vulnerable."

"One week I may be chatting to Mikhail Gorbachev in a London hotel, the next I might be talking on a TV show about my new book, or sharing a sofa with Chris de Burgh on another chat show," says Bill McGuire, living proof that being a climate scientist is far from dull.

McGuire is a volcanologist who has turned his attention to climate change, specifically trying to find out whether it will trigger volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and other hazardous geological phenomena.

Originally lured by Italy's pasta and wine, McGuire spent 20 years working on Mount Etna in Sicily. Now he regularly swaps jeans for a suit as director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, a consultancy that provides natural hazard and climate change expertise to businesses, governments and international agencies.

But climate change isn't just about the science. Communication is just as important, McGuire says. "Increasingly in the climate change sphere, science communication is seen as a critical aspect of an academic's work."

It's important to appreciate the influence you can have, he says. "Climate scientists have had an enormous impact on policy decisions, and without them climate change would not be where it is today - right at the top of the political agenda."

This means that climate change is attracting major funding in the UK, and rightly so, says McGuire. "The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has a major programme of research aimed at trying to understand our planet's climate system, and its many and varied complexities."

So what will be the future funding hotspots? Research into the response of the Gulf Stream and associated ocean currents to climate change will be high on the list, says McGuire, as these keep the climate of Europe mild compared with other locations at the same latitude. NERC is so concerned by this that it recently injected funds into a programme called RAPID-WATCH, which aims to monitor changes to the currents in order to provide an early warning of any untoward activity in the north Atlantic.

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